1. The Cooperative Grapevine February-March 2009
The
CGrapevine
OOPERATIVE
Good SamaritansPuzzle happyCrew leader awards Meet TerryTeaching kids Soldier on move
North Georgia EMC Employees & Retirees February-March 2009
What’s
Inside
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COOPERATIVE faces
8
Sympathy
To Carol Tousignant, Customer
Service Representative in Dalton,
in the passing of her mother, Joan
De Fore Ridley, on Jan. 28.
To Jerry Ware, co-op retiree, in
the passing of his mother, Nelia
Wehunt, on Jan. 3.
Joey and Richelle Blalock welcomed a baby girl,
Keely, on Jan. 20. She weighed 8 pounds and was
19 inches long. Joey is a Design Tech Apprentice in
Dalton.
Queen crowned
Keri O’Neal, grand-
daughter of Dalton
Customer Service
Representative Myra
Murray, recently was
named Homecoming
Queen at LaFayette High
School.
‘I owe it all to my training’
Calhoun team members’ training a huge benefit
when helping man whose truck flies off road into tree
M
aybe it was Crew Leader Chris Hornbrook’s decision to take a
straighter route (staying on Ga. Highway 156) back to the office
when he was carrying a pole on the digger/derrick truck. After all it
was raining on Dec. 18. Maybe it was the fact our co-op truck sits much
higher than most other vehicles. Or perhaps it was because while Hornbrook
was driving, his co-worker and Apprentice Lineworker Richard Berryhill was
gazing into the open Gordon County field for deer.
Whatever the reason, Hornbrook and Berryhill saw the compact pickup
smashed up against a tree 30 feet down and away from the
highway that morning around 11.
That’s when their safety training,
engrained in them month after
month at our cooperative, took
over.
“No hesitation,” Hornbrook
recalls of his and Berryhill’s
actions as he remembers smoke
was coming from under the truck’s hood. “Richard made
the call to our office. We parked the truck. Got our PPEs
(personal protective equipment) on and went to help. Our
training just kicked in.”
Before the two men headed down the steep slope
toward the truck, they grabbed the AED (Automatic
External Defibrillator), the first aid kit and some rope
(known as hand lines), put on protective gloves, and
headed in the direction of the wreck. The truck had
apparently sailed off the road and slammed front-first
into a tree. Impact hurled the windshield 30 feet and
mangled metal jammed both doors. Hornbrook remem-
bers extremely muddy conditions, adding “we had to
rope ourselves in and rope ourselves out.”
Arriving at the site, our two team members calmed the man, got phone
numbers to call, rendered first aid to his injured head and even disconnected
the positive wire from the battery post to avoid the potential of fire.
The driver of a nearby truck on Highway 156 had called 911 earlier and
returned to the accident scene after our men. Soon, the injured driver’s father
was reached by phone and quickly arrived.
“(The driver) didn’t know what day, month or year it was,” Berryhill says.
Our team members kept the man calm until emergency workers extracted him
with the Jaws of Life. Once out of the truck, it took eight men—our two
included—to get the man up to an ambulance. The driver suffered a severe
concussion and a broken jaw, but it could have been much worse.
After returning to our Calhoun office, our men followed blood-borne
pathogen safety protocol and properly disposed of blood-stained gloves and
clothing.
Of his actions, Berryhill says, “I owe it all to my training. I would hope
somebody would do the same for my family if we were involved in an acci-
dent.”
Hornbrook
Berryhill
Operation Round Up awards 6 grants worth $8,100
Our cooperative set an all-time peak
demand for electricity in its
service area at 701
megawatts (MWs) on the
morning of Jan. 19. TVA set
a new winter peak demand
of 32,675 megawatts (MW) at 8 a.m. on
Jan. 16 when temperatures across its
eight-state service area reached only
8.8 degrees.
NGEMC sets new peak;
TVA hits new winter high
TThhee CCoottttaaggee--FFaammiillyy CCrriissiiss CCeenntteerr::
$3,000 was awarded for a project in which officials
will buy 20 new dressers for the residents’ bedrooms
and a new washer and dryer. The Cottage provides
full-time shelter for neglected and abused boys and
girls ages 13 to 17 from Catoosa, Chattooga, Murray,
Walker and Whitfield counties.
Four Points, Inc.: $2,000 was given toward
the purchase of two desktop computers that would be
used to record notes from observations made during
its Supervised Visitation Program (SVP) activities.
SVP provides on-site supervised visitation for children
and non-custodial family members with domestic prob-
lems. Four Points is an agency that offers services
associated with the legal system to families involved in
domestic violence in Catoosa, Chattooga, Dade,
Walker and Whitfield counties.
Friendship House: $1,000 was given for a
project in which Friendship House will provide a one-
day, on-site training in Child Development and
Literacy for up to 60 child care teachers. Friendship
House provides quality, available and affordable child
care to almost 200 children in Gordon, Murray and
Whitfield counties.
Chattooga County Library
Summer Reading Program: Facing fund-
ing cuts and a book purchase budget that has
dropped by 50 percent, $1,000 was given to help the
program buy $500 in new children’s books and $500
for one or more cultural/literacy performers in the
their summer reading program. Studies have shown
that children who read during the summer maintain
their reading skills, and that children who see their
parents read, or who read with their parents, gener-
ally have scored higher on standardized tests.
Communities in Schools/Catoosa
County Performance Learning
Center School (PLC): $750 was awarded to a
project which helps high school students who are at risk
of dropping out. With this grant money, students who
attend the PLC in Fort Oglethorpe and meet target area
goals will receive gas cards and food cards to assist
them as they strive for success.
Will Work 4 Kids, Inc.: $395 was award-
ed to purchase a freezer to help cool and store food
for school-aged children participating in community
activities like cooking classes, games, and other
group events to develop life skills. Approximately 175
kids would be impacted in the Catoosa County area.
T
he North Georgia Electric
Membership Foundation, which
oversees Operation Round Up®
(ORU), is excited to announce that it has
awarded $8,145
in grant money
to six different
community orga-
nization projects,
which are listed
to the right.
Through ORU, our customers give
NGEMC permission to round up their
monthly electric bill so that the spare
change can be collected in a separate
fund that awards grants to worthwhile
community causes.
To sign up, customers can call us,
come by one of our offices or sign up
at www.ngemc.com. Their contributions are
tax deductible and they will receive a
summary of contributions on their
January bill.
401k information sessions: Riding out the storm
R
ecent extreme drops in the stock mar-
ket have many cooperative holders of
401k stock quite worried. But an
expert with the National Rural Electric
Cooperative Association urges us to stick
with what you already have and what you’re
already doing.
“Stay the course,” Dan Sharpe, Regional
Director of Relationship Managers for
NRECA, said at a recent class held about the Jason Fieder of NRECA talks about 401k plans
with Marshall Hulett, middle, and Chip Witherow,
both Line/Service Workers in Dalton.(See 401K on page 5)
Blalocks have a girl
Helping ice storm power
outage victims in Kentucky
January ice storms that hit Kentucky still had 80,000 peo-
ple served by TVA without power as of Feb. 2. Eight of our
line crew members went there to help with power restora-
tion. TVA said a total of 53 transmission lines and 22 cus-
tomer delivery points were impacted by the winter storm.
Our line crew members who went, from left, are Chad
Hodges, Todd Hixon, Adam Dennison, Chris Goodlet,
Chris Putnam, Steve Mathis, Jess Baker and Quentin
Jones. Not pictured are Patrick Clark and Lee Broyles who
later joined in to offer support in Kentucky.